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Old 06-16-2012, 12:23 AM   #61
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Your statements are just pure rhetoric. There is NO evidence that shows that the Jesus story was NOT wholly fabricated.
You negations are a bit ambiguous. Are you saying

~∃(x)Jx & ~Wx
or
~∃x(x)[Jx & ~Wx] ?

Or possibly ~∃x(x)[Jx & Wx] ?

Without a clear formal statement, it's hard to say refute what your are saying. It appears that you are saying there exists evidence which shows that the Jesus story is whole fabricated. But, as anybody with a basic familiarity with logic knows, this says nothing about the evidence that the Jesus story was is not wholly fabricated. All it says is that there is at least one piece of evidence that the Jesus story is fabricated. There could be a mountain of evidence that it is not.
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Old 06-16-2012, 01:12 AM   #62
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I decided, just for the fun of it, to change my focus on the topic from a linguistic/syntactic argument to dusting off my books on Josephan analyses from a literary/rhetorical/stylistic point of view. I started this with Cohen, but dropped it there to concentrate on the nature of Greek syntax both within and outside of Josephus. Unfortuantely, a lot of the analyses which deal directly with the passage in question are ones that I'm sure are "suspect" because they concern the historical Jesus. But that still left several volumes.

More than one either contains a paper or was written by one of the recent major contributers to Josephan studies, Steve Mason (currently a professor of history at York University).

In his book Josephus, Judae, and Christian Origins Mason includes a chapter on Josephus' historical method which is relavent here because of some interesting comments he makes about Josephus' writing style and previous analyses of his quality as a historian. In particular, he addresses the frequency of criticisms of Josphan "inconsistencies in the form of outright contradictions, editorial seems, dobulets, parallel versions, and differential vocabulary..." (p. 108). Mason doesn't disagree that, from a stylistic and historiographic perspective, Josephus' works are often problematic: "Josephus has the authorial habit of repeating and controdicting himself, and of varying his terminology." (p. 112). Most of Mason's discussion concerns factual contradictions between or within works (and is largely a refutation of Schwartz), but he also notes other, more purely stylistic issues, such as "verbatim" repitition and awkward juxtaposition of passages. However, particularly noteworthy is Mason's description of Josephus' methods used to refer to people and places. After noting one such example in Life, Mason writes: "Elsewhere too, and commonly in Antiquities 18-19, he alternates the names of people and places, evidently for the sake of variety."

Mason's description of Josephus' preference for variety when referring to people (and places) coheres with Cohen's analysis I cited previously, as well as my own.

However, in the edited volume Making History: Josephus and Historical Method, Schwartz responds to Mason's critique of his work in his (Schwartz') contributing paper. He argues that Mason downplays the incongruities, name-changing, and contradictions, in particular citing Mason's reference to alternating names in 18-19, and pointing out that these are minor compared to the ones Schwartzs dealt with in his work.


All of this also coheres with the study of word order irrespective of time or genre. Dik, for example, followed her comprehensive 1995 account of word order in Herodotus with her 1997 monograph Word Order in Greek Tragic Dialogue, where she notes from the beginning that "Greek word order has traditionally been defined as free, or flexible, meaning that, besides a number of rules that can be described in syntactic terms, established categories of (especially) syntax cannot adequately account for the variation found in texts." (p. 4).

Of course, this is nothing other than what I had previously said, quoting Helena Kurzová. Bakker's monograph on the noun phrase in ancient Greek is just as explicit: "In contrast to most modern European languages, in which the ordering of NP elements is rather fixed, the structure of the NP in Ancient Greek is extremely flexible in that various consituents may occur in almost every possible order and that each constituent may or may not be preceded by an article. As a result of this flexibility, the number of possible NP patterns is enormous."

So both from a stylistic and linguistic standpoint, there is no reason to view the syntax of AJ 20.200 as somehow suspect. Mason, in his Josephus and the New Testament, follows most scholars in suspecting that the mention of Jesus reflects the fact that Jesus had been mentioned earlier, in the now corrupt AJ 18.63ff. However, he also writes that the phrasing "means to indicate something of the accusations brought against James: just as his brother was condemned by some Jewish leaders, so also James ran afoul of Ananus." He also notes that "Josephus' phrasing seems to reflect James' usual nickname. Paul calls him "the Lord's Brother (Gal. 1:19), from a Christian perspective, and this title distinguished him from the many others with the same name." (p. 178).

All of these suggestions are, of course, speculative. The variety of methods Josephus employs when referring to people render hazardous any analysis of the preposes refence modifier in AJ 20.200. But whatever the case, there is certainly no syntactical support for an interpolation argument.
Does he explain that we don't have any original manuscripts of Jo or any other writer of that time. That all of his works were handed down and copied more than 3-4 times in the following centuries, most probably by christian monks ?
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Old 06-16-2012, 01:23 AM   #63
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Does he explain that we don't have any original manuscripts of Jo or any other writer of that time. That all of his works were handed down and copied more than 3-4 times in the following centuries, most probably by christian monks ?
Yes, actually. In more than one of his works. Are you aware of the general state of our manuscipt attestation (how many times do you think most of the texts from ancient history were copied, and from what century do you think most of our earliest copies date from)? And who was responsible for creating copies? In fact, Mason argues that one of the reasons Josephus received more attention than other authors was the fact that he dealt with Jesus and James.
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Old 06-16-2012, 06:19 AM   #64
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Originally Posted by aa5874 View Post
Your statements are just pure rhetoric. There is NO evidence that shows that the Jesus story was NOT wholly fabricated.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi View Post

You negations are a bit ambiguous. Are you saying

~∃(x)Jx & ~Wx
or
~∃x(x)[Jx & ~Wx] ?

Or possibly ~∃x(x)[Jx & Wx] ?
Please, your ability to copy and paste formulas do not impress me at all. It only shows that you are a master of rhetoric and highly skilled in diversion techniques.

Quote:
Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi View Post
Without a clear formal statement, it's hard to say refute what your are saying. It appears that you are saying there exists evidence which shows that the Jesus story is whole fabricated. But, as anybody with a basic familiarity with logic knows, this says nothing about the evidence that the Jesus story was is not wholly fabricated. All it says is that there is at least one piece of evidence that the Jesus story is fabricated. There could be a mountain of evidence that it is not.
Again, your response is all rhetoric. You appear incapable of addressing the issue and have NO intention to ever properly investigate the evidence from antiquity.

Examine your own statement.

Quote:
Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi
...Obviously we wouldn't have christianity without the O/T. But it is one thing to assert that the gospels and other early "christian" texts rely heavily on interpretations, re-interpretations, and elaborations of Jewish beliefs and texts, and quite another to say that the entirety of the Jesus tradition/sect was created out of these wholecloth.
We have ALL the evidence in place to argue that the Jesus story was INVENTED and NOT based on an actual human being.

We have the short-ending gMark, the Interpolated gMark, gMatthew, gLuke, gJohn, Acts of the Apostles, the Pauline writings, the general Epistles, Revelation, the non-Canonical writings, the Dated NT manuscripts, the Dated Non-Canonical manuscripts, the Dated Non apologetic sources, Apologetic sources and MANY FORGERIES.

We have THOUSANDS of sources of antiquity that show that Jesus had NO real existence.

We have ZERO--NIL--NO sources of antiquity that wrote of an OBSCURE man of Nazareth baptized by John and crucified under Pilate.

HJ was INVENTED.

Please, the table has turned HJers can no longer depend upon presumptions, logical fallacies, and unreliable sources.

The UTTER weakness of the HJ argument has been Fatally EXPOSED by Bart Ehrman.

We can now say WITHOUT fear of any reasonable doubt that Jesus NEVER had any real existence in the 1st century and this includes the disciples and Paul.
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Old 06-16-2012, 06:56 AM   #65
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Originally Posted by angelo atheist View Post
Does he explain that we don't have any original manuscripts of Jo or any other writer of that time. That all of his works were handed down and copied more than 3-4 times in the following centuries, most probably by christian monks ?
Quote:
Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi View Post
Yes, actually. In more than one of his works. Are you aware of the general state of our manuscipt attestation (how many times do you think most of the texts from ancient history were copied, and from what century do you think most of our earliest copies date from)? And who was responsible for creating copies? In fact, Mason argues that one of the reasons Josephus received more attention than other authors was the fact that he dealt with Jesus and James.
Remarkably the very same Apologetic sources that mentioned James and Jesus in Antiquities ALSO claimed Jesus was FATHERED by a Holy Ghost.

Origen mentioned Jesus and James and stated Jesus was FATHERED by a Holy Ghost and was the Son of a God.

Here is the SUPPORTING evidence.

"Against Celsus" 2
Quote:
But at that time there were no armies around Jerusalem, encompassing and enclosing and besieging it; for the siege began in the reign of Nero, and lasted till the government of Vespasian, whose son Titus destroyed Jerusalem, on account, as Josephus says, of James the Just, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, but in reality, as the truth makes clear, on account of Jesus Christ the Son of God.
According to Origen Jesus in TRUTH was the Son of a God.

Now, more SUPPORTING Evidence that Jesus was described as being FATHERED by a Ghost.

Against Celsus 1.32
Quote:
.....let us see whether those who have blindly concocted these fables about the adultery of the Virgin with Panthera, and her rejection by the carpenter, did not invent these stories to overturn His miraculous conception by the Holy Ghost.............It was to be expected, indeed, that those who would not believe the miraculous birth of Jesus would invent some falsehood....
It is a falsehood that Jesus was conceived by a sexual reproduction--Jesus was conceived by a Ghost according to sources that mentioned Josephus.
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Old 06-16-2012, 07:41 AM   #66
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For those people wondering what is going on in most of this thread, I have put forward a rather clear claim, which is that the word order of AJ 20.200 is not normal in the context. The word order is as follows:
τον αδελφον Ιησου λεγομενου χριστου Ιακωβος ονομα αυτω
the brother of Jesus called christ by the name of James
Note that the relationship ("brother of...") explaining which James comes first, rather than the topic, James. The simple word order would be:
Ιακωβον τον αδελφον Ιησου λεγομενου χριστου
James the brother of Jesus called christ
The person who is the topic of the phrase is normally placed first, in this case James and Jesus is there only to define which James.

I have argued in this thread that Josephus introduces people using this simple word order with two exceptions:
  1. that the person who is used to define the topic person has already been mentioned, to use LegionOnomaMoi's own example:
    In AJ 11.7.1 (29[8]), we also find a certain Jesus introduced by his brother John: ἀδελφὸς ἦν τῷ Ἰωάννῃ Ἰησοῦς/"brother was to John Jesus." with the name of the person introduced again found last.
    Not surprisingly John had just been mentioned. Or

  2. that the person who is used to define the topic person is clearly famous in his own right, as in another example that LegionOnomaMoi himself provided:
    In both BJ and AJ a certain Ptolemy is twice identified by his brother, and both times his name appears last: ton adelphon Nikolaou Ptolemaion and adelphon ton Nikolaou Ptolemaion.
    Nicolaos of Damascus was a famous writer known for his close relationship with Herod the king and was also a major source for Josephus's history.

In both these cases we should expect a marked word order, ie a word order that doesn't reflect the simple, usual word order. Rather than saying anything that helped his own case with these examples, LegionOnomaMoi was simply demonstrating the situation I have already outlined.

LegionOnomaMoi, in trying to undermine the fact that the word order in AJ 20.200 is anomalous, also pointed to another statement from Josephus:
In 6.92, he first introduces this James, identifying him by his father. What is also interesting about this reference is that the introduction reads …Sosa hious Iakobos…, beginning with the father and ending with the name of the person identified.
You will note that the situation I was talking about was the introduction of a figure. The reference to AJ 6.92 also fails to help the view LegionOnomaMoi is trying to sustain, for this in fact is not where "Sosa's son James" is introduced. I pointed out that Josephus "actually introduces him in 4.235, Ιακοβω παιδι Σωσα (James child of Sosa)." Hence LegionOnomaMoi stopped talking about "introducing" and switched to "re-introducing", which is irrelevant to our situation in AJ 20.200 where this James is actually introduced, not re-introduced. LegionOnomaMoi has insisted that it doesn't matter if the person has already been introduced, but we are in fact dealing with a person who is introduced.

We are left with the fact that James in 20.200 is introduced not using the simple word order he uses throughout his writings for such introductions, with the two noted and understandable exceptions that are not applicable here.

LegionOnomaMoi has insisted that "that the variation in Josephus when it comes to introductions/identifications is vast", which I don't disagree with. However, we have strong consistent evidence that, when Josephus had a familial connection--a father or a brother--, he did, with noted exceptions, introduce figures placing that familial connection after the topic person, ie not "the brother of Jesus James by name" but "James the brother of Jesus".

With possible exceptions, Josephus frequently introduces people whose familial connections he doesn't seem to know by giving what the person is and adding X his name. I carried out an informal search and found
  1. Talking of prisoners in AJ 20.4 he mentions "one of them, named Annibas".
  2. In 20.34 he mentions "a certain Jewish merchant named Ananias".
  3. In 20.43, "a certain other Jew that came from Galilee named Eleazar".
  4. In 20.97, "a certain man named Theudas".
  5. In 20.130, "a leader of the Jews named Doetus".
  6. In 20.163, "a native of Jerusalem named Doras".
These six examples are all within the same book as, and before, our passage of interest, showing that Josephus does use this means of referring to people whose family connection he does not supply. However, Josephus supposedly supplied the familial connection in 20.200.

-o0o-

If anyone thinks that, through the fog of generic statements of various scholars talking of Josephan word order that LegionOnomaMoi has flooded this thread with, there is actually some evidence supplied that shows that the word order in 20.200 of "the brother of Jesus called christ by the name of James" is anything other than unexpected let me know, preferably editing down the text wall so as to get to the relevant evidence. LegionOnomaMoi has too much difficulty getting to the nitty gritty. It is frustrating to wade through the shite hoping for the unlikely, so instead of wasting time coming up emptyhanded any more, I've put him on ignore. I'll leave it up to you: only quote stuff that you think directly deals with the topic of the word order in AJ 20.200.

.
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Old 06-16-2012, 08:29 AM   #67
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Again, it is mind boggling that it cannot be understood that Galatians 1.19 and Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1 have NO real significance in the argument for an historical Jesus.

Any person, even a child, knows that we can have brothers who do NOT have the same father.

Please, who was the Father of Jesus and who was the Father of James???

Are they the same???

These very simple questions have been answered. The matter has been RESOLVED.

We cannot continue day after day bilindly regurgitating irrelevant information.

According to Apologetic sources, The Father of James the Apostle was Alphaeus or some other person.

According to Apologetic sources the Father of Jesus was God by the Holy Ghost.

Please, let us do history. We have Existing Codices.

In the short-ending gMark it is claimed that there was some other person than Jesus Christ who was called Christ, the Anointed One.

Mark 9:38 KJV
Quote:
And John answered him, saying , Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us.
We cannot PRESUME that there was ONLY one Messianic claimant in the history of Jews.

And if Jesus was REGARDED as a Messianic ruler in Josephus then he was NOT an OBSCURE preacher.

Jesus the Messianic ruler and King of the Jews IS not Obscure HJ.

Plus, we have NO Dated sources of Josephus from the 1st century.
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Old 06-16-2012, 08:52 AM   #68
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Again, it is mind boggling that it cannot be understood that Galatians 1.19 and Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1 have NO real significance in the argument for an historical Jesus.

Any person, even a child, knows that we can have brothers who do NOT have the same father.

Please, who was the Father of Jesus and who was the Father of James???

Are they the same???

These very simple questions have been answered. The matter has been RESOLVED.

We cannot continue day after day bilindly regurgitating irrelevant information.

According to Apologetic sources, The Father of James the Apostle was Alphaeus or some other person.

According to Apologetic sources the Father of Jesus was God by the Holy Ghost.

Please, let us do history. We have Existing Codices.

In the short-ending gMark it is claimed that there was some other person than Jesus Christ who was called Christ, the Anointed One.

Mark 9:38 KJV
Quote:
And John answered him, saying , Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us.
We cannot PRESUME that there was ONLY one Messianic claimant in the history of Jews.

And if Jesus was REGARDED as a Messianic ruler in Josephus then he was NOT an OBSCURE preacher.

Jesus the Messianic ruler and King of the Jews IS not Obscure HJ.

Plus, we have NO Dated sources of Josephus from the 1st century.
Quote:
Again, it is mind boggling that it cannot be understood that Galatians 1.19 and Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1 have NO real significance in the argument for an historical Jesus.

LOL! They are very important for the right people, namely those with a PhD in ancient history. How could they pretend inerrant knowledge without such questions?
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Old 06-16-2012, 11:13 AM   #69
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Spin, what comment would you have on the fact that when Origen reports three times on the so-called "lost reference" in Josephus to the effect that the reason for the fall of Jerusalem was because of the murder of James (a reference which could not have been in Antiquities 20 and could not have really been authentic to Josephus), he states the point in all three places with this word order:

"...James (the Just) the brother of Jesus called Christ..."

In other words--and this does not appear to be a direct quote of Josephus by Origen, but a paraphrase--Origen uses the "normal" word order we would expect. If he is doing this out of instinct based on a memory he hasn't just verified by checking, doesn't this suggest that even to a Christian, placing the name James before the identification as brother of Jesus, would have been the instinctively normal way?

Does this argue against the word order in the extant Ant. 20 being that of a Christian interpolator? I don't think so (a) because as you show, it would have been unusual word order even for Josephus because this instance does not conform to the circumstances under which Josephus employs that reverse word order, and (b) because I think there is a good possibility that Josephus wrote "brother of Jesus" but not referring to the Christian one, with "called Christ" added later, perhaps by Eusebius or perhaps from a marginal gloss. In that case, any juggling of word order might have been deliberately undertaken.

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Old 06-16-2012, 11:58 AM   #70
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LOL! They are very important for the right people, namely those with a PhD in ancient history. How could they pretend inerrant knowledge without such questions?
Are you implying only people with a PhD can be true Christians, or true HJers or true MJers???

It is an absurd notion that ordinary people cannot determine or argue about whether or not Jesus of the Canon had any real existence.
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